Welcome new and old members!

[ashcloud]

YARRR Pyrates!

It has been some time since I was on the forums here last time, just saw the news on golem.de and came here right away.

The pandora is awesome, I'm using mine a lot, but has some flaws. I'm really glad to see a really major upgrade from you guys. After all this mess with the Pandora I would understand if you do not want to go through that a second time Yeah, I think this time you really know what you're doing and that's gonna make it a lot easier.

I wish you a lot of success with the Pyra and a lots of support from the community. You have mine already

The details you mentioned are really what I wanted for a Pandora Successor. If you manage to include them all that would be really awesome, so that the Pyra will be a lot more useful than the Pandora. I especially like the idea of having Debian as the standard OS, witch gives access to lots of lots of software available almost immediately (e.g. there was not even a subversion package installable from the Angstrom repos). Also the USB Port of the Pandora is not that much usable and it doesn't have a decent external display interface. Really glad to see those things fixed in the future.

I think it will be a lot of fun (just as in those old days with the Pandora ^^) to follow the development of the Pyra. What are we going to see this time? Catastrophic volcano explosions? Burning Trucks full of Pyras running through the country? Or just another happy Chinese New Year? Some Monsters from the depth of the ocean determined to hunt down and destroy all the Pyra nubs?  Preorder websites groaning and breaking down under heavy load? Are you be prepared for another epic and crazy Two Months™?

You'll better be!

 

[Skin-nl]

The pyra looks AWESOME!!!! A must have for the future

 

[Asmo]

Thanks to a few familiar names, you've hit Neogaf -


http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=761768

 

[iprice]

That short vid was awesome. Well done ED and co.

 

[Bosbeetle]

This somehow feels as the part of being strapped in just before the roller coaster really start! I already know Im going to enjoy the ride!

 

[Binky]

^ don't you mean walking aboard, pulling up the gangplank and casting off?

We are Pyrates, after all...

 

[socket]

Holy crap!  I haven't been here in probably over a year.  I have had 2 separate pandoras, broke my 1st tinkering (sold it to someone with much steadier hands) and sold my 2nd for a bargain to a friend who had far more time on his hands (have regretted it ever since). Randomly came back tonight to the awesome news.  Wow.  Please tell me where to send my money

 

[Bosbeetle]

^ don't you mean walking aboard, pulling up the gangplank and casting off?

We are Pyrates, after all...

hoist the sails, and show me the vats of rum

 

[ghostpatch]

nice presentation! So the board design and the case are going to be open source? sweet! ; )

I'm for using preorder as method to finance the fist run. I'm sure we will have no problems finding enough people. I'm in!

An LED to indicate microphone usage is bypassable. Not 100% safe. ED, you shoud't do that. I remeber a case but can't find a link. I'm probably going to desolder it anyway if it doen't break it. I do that with most devices. I'm not paranoid.

Using it as desktop is the most interesting case of usage for me. Does anyone know how much open tabs I can expect it to handle? I usually have 20 to 30 open.

 

[Binky]

An LED to indicate microphone usage is bypassable.

Not always.

You could have a pair of software-controlled switches with inputs shorted together, one driving the LED, the other other the Mic.

The case you are thinking of is one where some idiot relied on fancy drivers to turn the LED on at the same time as the microphone

 

[comradekingu]

If its an rgb led it could even be a functional thing, to show level and keep within compression limits

 

[rohezal]

The case you are thinking of is one where some idiot relied on fancy drivers to turn the LED on at the same time as the microphone

The apple led video hack, was not a driver problem. There was a hardware chip which controlled the led and the mic and it could just disable both at the same time. But you could flash a new firmware on this chip, and modify the firmware you want to flash on it.

 

[birdog]

Has a price range been mentioned?   I need to start saving as I am definitely in.  Would love 4gb ram if possible and I too would prefer the 4g but will opt in for 3g if that is all is avail.

 

[mclien]

 I'm not paranoid.

Even if you/we are/were. Doesn't mean we are not stalked ;-))

Anyway. I think Pyra will be the device I have always wanted (or at least closest to it).

I'm in as long as we don't get a 4 digit Price (in EUR)...

Will there be some sort of alerting system so I don't miss the preorder point?

 

[Agrajag]

Great job ED!  I look forward to seeing the finished product, and indeed buying it.

 

[Binky]

The case you are thinking of is one where some idiot relied on fancy drivers to turn the LED on at the same time as the microphone

The apple led video hack, was not a driver problem. There was a hardware chip which controlled the led and the mic and it could just disable both at the same time. But you could flash a new firmware on this chip, and modify the firmware you want to flash on it.

Ah, whoops. I really should check my facts...

 

[ivanovic]

Has a price range been mentioned?   I need to start saving as I am definitely in.  Would love 4gb ram if possible and I too would prefer the 4g but will opt in for 3g if that is all is avail.

No, a pricerange has not been mentioned.

Regarding the financing part:

I hope that ED does not go the kickstarter way but tries to handle it via the community. The reason is simple:

Yes, a lot of money could be raised using kickstarter (or similar plattforms which offer such a service), but those platforms always want a share. Even if this share is as low as 5% (that is the amount which would go to kickstarter) plus 3-5% (the amount amazon earns if their payment channel is used), this would still mean that suddenly 10% are lost. IMO it would be better if ED had this money as buffer instead of the platform getting their share.

 

[konqithedragon]

In Dragon I Trust.

 

[rohezal]

A lot of people are using kickstarter not only to finance the project (or maybe don't use it all to finance the project) but have good advertising. A lot of people will backe and if there is a goal and a strech goal, they will ask people they know if they want to backe too. Good spread of word. But I would prefer to to sell it in the boards. And maybe backe something different, maybe a famous game or engine like unity to be ported to the Pandora. Maybe when we got 100,000$ they will port unity to the Pandora and then the game studios could just press the "Pandora" button and release their games for the Pandora/Pyra. Lots of advertising, games like Pillars of Eternity and War for the Overworld could become avaible on the Pyra.

 

[SeeThruHead]

Definitely needs a kickstarter campaign.